Introduction To Child Development and Forest School.

Today, I tee up a series of further episodes that I’ll be approaching over the coming weeks, surrounding child development and Forest School

Child development is a process every child goes through.

What Is Child Development?

Simply this process involves a child learning and mastering many skills that will benefit them in life such as walking, talking, making friends, etc.

During the first 5 years of a child’s life, there is almost unimaginable physical, social, cognitive and emotional change and growth that takes place.

There are five main areas of development in which children develop skills:

• Cognitive Development: This is the child’s ability to learn and solve problems.
• Social and Emotional Development: This is the child’s ability to interact with others, which includes being able to help themselves and self-control.
• Speech and Language Development: This is the child’s ability to both understand and use language.
• Fine Motor Skill Development: This is the child’s ability to use small muscles, specifically their hands and fingers, to pick up small objects, hold a spoon, turn pages in a book, or use a crayon to draw.
• Gross Motor Skill Development: This is the child’s ability to use large muscles.

Child Development Milestones

Most children learn these skills and reach certain things called developmental milestones, during predictable time periods and are built on top of another. Simply by a certain age a child will potentially be able to do XYZ.

This also means that a child will need to develop some skills before he or she can develop other skills.

For example, children must first learn to crawl and to pull up to a standing position before they are able to walk.

Growth and development obviously continue during the child’s early life until maturity at adulthood, however that growth is not as rapid as we see in the early years. In these early years, children work out their place in world.

They are part of a family, a community, a social system. They are also an individual being and their foundations of personality are well and truly formed.

Why is this important for a Forest School leader to know?

Through observing and understanding in depth the development of your child, we can learn more about them and where they are at.

This informs which areas we need to concentrate on in a child’s holistic development and highlights the most effective ways to help them to achieve this.

If you haven’t heard me speak before holistic development meaning the development of the whole child instead of individual parts or areas is a key trait of Forest School and I am a big advocate for this.

With a strong knowledge of your child’s development, we can also identify if your child may have difficulties or delays, and how best to help them overcome these and how to support them effectively whilst at Forest School.

The Milestones As A Guide For Development

This said each child is an individual and may meet developmental milestones a little earlier or later than his peers and should only be compared to their own progress. I must state here that these milestones are simply a guide or an indicator and should not be taken as gospel.

However, there are definitely blocks of time when most children will meet a milestone. And developmental milestones don’t just end once kids are six or seven. All five areas continue to develop up to the age of 21 for most children, especially boys.

Although gross motor, fine motor and speech and language development have reached a plateau, cognitive and social development will continue to snowball.

Forest School; The Perfect Learning Tool For Child Development?

Forest School is ably suited to meeting a wide variety of children at different developmental stages what with it’s child led learning approach putting them in charge of what and how they learn, usually through play the secret magic to every child’s learning, being situated in a stimulating sensory environment that is the outdoors, interacting socially with a mix of ages, being allowed time and space to develop holistically and done repeatedly over a long period of time to create that learning groove.

When your child attends Forest School they will always be met where they are at.

I’m super excited for the next few weeks, in which I’m going to be explore some key child development theories and theorists that have particular relevance to the Forest School movement and go deep into them but at the same time make them super simple to understand.

This is the kind of stuff I love geeking out on and perhaps you do to.

You’re Just One Sessions Away…